How to Fix Quotas
Last modified: November 11, 2020
Overview
We enable quotas by default on new installations.
If you have enabled Quota System Administration notifications in the Contact Manager interface (WHM >> Home >> Server Contacts >> Contact Manager), the system sends notifications when it is ready to reboot and when the quota scan finishes and quotas are functional.
CloudLinux™ 7 updates may break quotas. For this reason, after each CloudLinux 7 update, you must run the
/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/fixquotas
script and then remount the file system.If you disable and then reenable quotas, servers that use the XFS® filesystem and run CentOS 7 or 8, CloudLinux 7 or 8, or Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® (RHEL) 7 require additional actions for quotas to function properly:
WHM Interface — Use WHM’s Initial Quota Setup interface (WHM >> Home >> Server Configuration >> Initial Quota Setup) to configure quotas.
Command Line — Run the
/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/fixquotas
script and then remount the file system.Manually via the Command Line — For instructions on how to perform the
/usr/local/cpanel/scripts/fixquotas
script’s actions manually, read the Red Hat XFS and XFS Quota Management documentation.
This document describes how to confirm whether you properly configured the disk space quotas on your system’s devices.
You must enable quotas for any device on which cPanel accounts exist.
cPanel & WHM versions 76 and later enable quotas by default on new installations.
Fix quotas
To verify whether your devices use quotas, perform the following actions:
You must log in as the root
user via SSH on your system before you perform these actions.
Run the mount command
Run the mount
command to obtain basic information about currently-mounted file systems.
When you run this command without any arguments, the system displays information for all of its mounted file systems.
Entries that contain the usrquota
variable are quota-enabled.
The following example confirms that the /dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00
device uses quotas:
|
|
For more information about the mount
command, visit the mount
command documentation.
Examine the fstab file contents
The file system table (fstab
) file maps devices to their respective mount points within a system.
The contents of the fstab
file will resemble the following example:
usrquota
variable are quota-enabled.
|
|
The fstab
system configuration file displays configuration options in six columns. These options determine the purpose of each file system and how it should mount.
Column | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
Device | The physical device that contains the data. | /dev/sda5 |
Mountpoint | The filepath to the device’s data storage location. | /backup |
FStype | The type of file system. | ext3 |
Options | The mount options for the file system. These options include whether quotas are enabled and whether the system or users can execute programs on the device. | defaults,noexec |
Dump | The dump option. The dump backup utility uses this option. |
0 |
Pass | The fsck option. The fsck file checking utility uses this option. |
0 |
The Dump and Pass values do not impact quotas.
For more information about the fstab
file, visit the fstab
command documentation.
How to enable quotas
After you verify which devices do not use quotas, perform the following steps to enable quotas for the desired devices.
Run the initquotas script
To enable quotas on a device, run the /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/initquotas
script. This script adds the usrquota
string to the Options
column in the /etc/fstab
file.
Verify that you enabled quota files
After you run the /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/initquotas
script, confirm that the quota files exist in the root directory (/
) and that each file is greater than 0 bytes.
Use the ls
command with a wildcard character. For example:
|
|
The example above uses the ls
command to list the contents of the root directory (/). The -l
flag causes ls
output to display in long listing format. This format displays the following information:
- The file’s permissions.
- Which user owns the file.
- Which group owns the file.
- The size of the file in bytes.
- The file’s last modification date.
If these files do not exist, run the /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/initquotas
script again to create the files.
If these files do exist but quotas do not function, delete these files and then run the /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/initquotas
or /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/fixquotas
scripts.
Ensure quotas report on the system
Run the following command to confirm that you successfully enabled quotas on the device:
repquota -a
This command prints all of the file systems that exist in the /etc/mtab
file with read and write privileges and quota options enabled.
What if my quotas still do not function?
If you experience further problems, perform one of the following actions:
Disable the Cache disk quota information setting in the System section of WHM’s Tweak Settings interface (WHM >> Home >> Server Configuration >> Tweak Settings).
Set the
disablequotacache
parameter to0
in the/var/cpanel/cpanel.config
file.
If you still experience problems with quotas, open a support ticket.
A note about Virtuozzo®
If you use Virtuozzo, you must perform the following actions:
Enable second-level (per-user) quotas in addition to first-level (per-container) quotas.
Enable second-level quotas from the parent node.
For more information, read our Enable Quotas on a Virtuozzo VPS documentation.